In the July-August 2024 issue of the Smithsonian magazine, in an article on “Mapping the Mississippi,” Boyce Uphold writes of Thomas Jefferson:
“Jefferson had formed a vision for new territory west of the Appalachian Mountains. It would fuel the creation of an ‘empire for liberty.’…
“After the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War in 1783, Britain ceded… territory that doubled the size of the U.S. Along with the original 13 colonies, the new country now included territory that stretched all the way to the Mississippi River, to the western edges of what would become Wisconsin, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, and the northern part of Mississippi. These new lands offered the space that Jefferson needed to establish an empire of landed farmers—‘cultivators,’ as he called them, or ‘husbandmen.’ Jefferson did not want the soot-stained, over-mobbed cities that were growing like ‘sores’ on the body of Europe. Nor was untamed nature a suitable fit for the new nation. He hoped the Mississippi watershed would be converted to a garden—or a collection of gardens, spreading across the landscape like a quilt. Private property would be everywhere…
“In the land ordinance of 1785, Jefferson came up with a plan for parceling out the new territory: Lay out a perfect grid of townships, each covering 36 square miles, which could be broken into 640-acre sections, then split again into 160-acre quarter sections. Rather than allow an unorganized tumble of men to pick lots on their whim, the whole empire would be catalogued, then sold at auctions in land offices across the territories. With the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, this massive effort spread into the western watershed…”
One can take this in any number of directions, one direction being the “western watershed” that gets us to Walla Walla treaties and local homesteads. But the bigger idea is that the Jeffersonian view of America, the one that caught on and has largely driven our history for 240 years, is that the country would be populated by rural, yeoman farmers, and that the endless lands taken from “the merciless Indian savages, whose warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions,” (Jefferson wrote that) would be measured and auctioned off.
For the Natives, who lived on and with land, fished, hunted, gathered, grew corn and beans and other crops, revered and passed on usage rights, the notion that land was a commodity that could be measured, bought and sold was totally foreign. The two concepts of land—that of Euro-settlers and Jefferson; and that of the Tribes that settlers encountered as they crossed the continent were—and in some sense still are—mutually unintelligible.
Not said, but before the adoption of the income taxe (used briefly during the Civil War, implemented finally only in 1913), I believe the largest source of US revenue was selling Indian lands—which continued right through “allotment” in the late 1800s and “Termination” in the 1950s.
One can go another direction, that of Jill Lepore and other historians who see our history not as the mapping out and taking of Indians lands, but as the working out of the words of founding documents: all men “equal” extending first to non-property owners, then to Blacks, then women, and, finally, American Indians.
This direction bypasses the strong dose of anti-Catholicism in our past. The fur trade to the north, largely in the hands of the British Hudson’s Bay Company, was not a “settling” organization. They were in the game for profit, and gladly hired Catholic French voyajeurs, even brought priests along to marry them with their Native wives. The Catholic Mission at Walla Walla that became a screaming point for Henry Spalding’s diatribes against Catholics (they put the Cayuse up to murdering the Whitmans, he wrote) was brought courtesy the fur trade.
Fur trade books are relegated to the “western” publishers at U of Oklahoma and U of Nebraska presses. They don’t fit the Anglo-Protestant march towards the Pacific, which was, surely, an outgrowth of Jefferson’s measure, settle, and sell philosophy.
We could go south too, to the Spanish—Catholic—holdings in North America. Not as nice and sanguine a story as that of the northern Catholics and their Metis culture. The story of the Spanish and Catholic settlement of California is a cruel one. I wonder still why Father Serra is being made a saint in the wake of Catholic cruelties towards California Catholics.
Despite the claims or wishes of some Christian Nationalists, Jefferson was not a Christian, but probably a Deist. He even wrote his own Bible—which excludes the miracles and the ressurection. But he was a firm believer and primary practitioner of what became known in later years as “Manifest Destiny.” It is pretty much captured in those few words quoted above. And the standard “measured” version of American history—thankfully contested today by a number of fine indigenous, Latino, and Black writers and historians—comes straight from the pen of Thomas Jefferson.
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